Page 189 of Quicksilver
Corcoran?
Holy…hells.
The Corcoran were…
“Which one of us do you worship more fervently?” The twin on the right asked. “Bal?” She gestured to herself. “Or Mithin?” She gestured to her counterpart. “We have such competitions over who is most popular.” A lightning storm raging in her eyes now. No sooner had I noticed it than I felt the sharp prickling of static in the air. The fine hairs all over my body stood up.
This…was really happening? They weregods?I swallowed down my nerves, then bowed my head respectfully, looking down at my feet. “How could anyone love Bal more than Mithin? Or treasure Mithin more than Bal? You’re worshipped equally by all those who know your names, my ladies.”
“Myladies!”the sun goddesses cried at the same time. They grinned at each other happily, still holding each other’s hands. “She speaks with such lovely manners.” The one who gave me their names held out her hand to me. “Come on. We should hurry. Father’s waiting for you, and he doesn’t have much patience for waiting these days. He’ll be annoyed if we delay much longer.”
I didn’t reach out my hand to her. One second, it was hanging by my side. The next, it was already in her cool grip. I took one step, and the field surrounding us stretched thin, becoming a green blur. When my heel struck the ground, the sloping hill was no longer in front of us. We were standing on top of it, beneath the boughs of the impressive oak tree.
My mind struggled to catch up with the change in location, my thoughts gluey.
Amidst the roots of the giant oak tree, a broad, eight-foot-wide ribbon of silver formed a moat.Somuch quicksilver. I started when I noticed beads of the shining metal spilling down the tree’s broad trunk like sap and rolling into the moat.
On a smooth rock, ten feet away, a male sat alone with his back to us. His robe was the same dark grey as the sun goddesses’ clothes, his long, brown hair tied back into war braids. Giggling, Bal and Mithin waved me forward, indicating that I should go to him.
A ball of anxiety clenched into a fist at the center of my ribcage. If these two giddy girls were indeed goddesses, then I could hazard a guess as to who their father was just from looking at the back of his head.
Everlayne had barely been able to utter his name without shivering. She’d warned in no uncertain terms that a person should never letthisGod look upon them. Not even a statue of him. And here he was—the physical embodiment of him, anyway—sitting on a rock, waiting to have a chat with me.
Fuck.
“Come forward, Alchemist,” he commanded. His was the voice that had asked me if I wanted to pass through the door or stay in Yvelia with Fisher; I had a feeling that it was his voice I had been speaking to for a long time now. I stepped forward, holding my breath, and moved around the rock. Facing the God, I angled my jaw and met his cool, blue eyes. I had expected some terrible visage. A hideous, twisted face with madness in its gaze, but no. If he’d been human, I would have judged him in his middle years. His face was lightly lined and had a kindness and wisdom that took me by surprise.
He looked up at me, his hands resting on his knees, and said, “You know who I am?”
I bowed my head a little, again looking down at my boots. “Zareth. God of Chaos.”
Zareth grunted. “And you are Saeris. Sister to Hayden. Daughter to no one.” He nodded to the inkwork on my hands. “Also, mate to my champion.”
I glanced down at the marks, still a little surprised to see them there, staining my skin. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Zareth rose from his seat on the rock, and my legs trembled. He was no taller than Fisher. No broader or more God-like in appearance, but the sheer well of power that swelled from him as he took me in made me want to drop to my knees and throw myself at his feet. He could blink and eradicate me from existence. I knew that with certainty. If he wanted me to, I would vanish, never to have even been born in the first place.
“We must make this quick, or you’ll die before you’ve been of use to me. I will be as concise as I can, given the circumstances. I’ve spent a great deal of time watching the threads of the universe, waiting for one such as you,” he said. “An Alchemist, at last, to reset the balance and clear the way for what is to come.” Turning, he went to the edge of the quicksilver pool that surrounded the great tree, and I followed, drawn along by the pull of him.
He stepped to the very edge of the quicksilver and looked at me. “Here, we stand at the edge of the universe. The roots you see, growing down into the earth, into the quicksilver, are the anchors of fate.” He tipped his head back, his eyes traveling upward into the boughs of the tree. “The silver leaves above mark all the realms of our domain. My family are the stewards of all you see here. We water the roots of fate. We train the boughs and prune the leaves to prevent rot and decay. You see the bough there? The blackened one?”
I looked where he was pointing and did notice one particular branch of the tree. Its bark was darker than the rest, shriveled, with fewer silver leaves sprouting from it. “Yes, I see it.”
Zareth nodded. Lifting his hand, he swept his fingers through the air, and as I watched, three of the bough’s leaves dislodged and fell. They floated down, fluttering and spinning, to land on the surface of the quicksilver. “There is a rot spreadingthroughout my domain, Saeris,” he said. “Realms that are infected with that rot have to be summarily destroyed to protect the rest of the tree and prevent that rot from spreading. Do you understand?”
Those leaves had been realms. Whole worlds. Zareth had just…waved his hand and…wiped them out. I stared at them as they sank and disappeared below the surface of the quicksilver. Was it possible? Could he really just have done that? “How many people…” I couldn’t get the rest of the question out, but the God standing beside me knew exactly what I was asking him.
“Billions.” He answered without the faintest hint of emotion. Yes, then. I had just witnessed genocide on a scale I couldn’t comprehend, And Zareth just smiled. “You aren’t the only Alchemist in the universe, of course,” he said. “There are millions of you out there. Even in your realm, even in the city you once called your home, there are hundreds of elemental magic wielders who can command the quicksilver. But when I consulted the fates long ago, I was very intrigued when I sawyou,Saeris Fane. Not just you. Kingfisher, too. I saw an axis in the flow of things. A burning knot in the tapestry of all that would come to be. When I focused and saw the strength of the bond that connected the two of you together, I admit I attempted to sway the fates.”
“What do you mean, sway the fates?” I whispered.
Zareth glanced down the gently rolling slope to the field where his daughters had returned and were laughing raucously, hands grasped, spinning each other around in the tall grass. “You were supposed to have been born Fae, in the same realm as your Kingfisher. So I separated you. Hundreds of years before you were born, I shifted the events around your birth. Moved the pieces on the board and placed you far away, in a realm that should never have come into contact with his. But I watched as the boughs of the universe grew against their natureand aligned in such a way that you would still meet. I foresaw then that no matter how the boughs and branches of this tree were manipulated, you and he would always collide. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”
Fisher had said his mother was wrong sometimes, about small things that had big consequences. When she had predicted me rushing into her son’s life, she had seen me with sloped ears and canines like her son. It turned out she hadn’t been wrong after all. Ishouldhave been born Fae. The God of Chaos had simply interfered.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you want to keep us apart? What does it matter to you if we love each other and live our lives together?”
Zareth considered me for a moment. Inhaling sharply, he rushed past me, around the tree, to a point on the bank of the moat where the grass was pressed flat against the earth…and the boughs of the tree were twisted into bare, blackened knots. I hadn’t noticed it from our vantage point just now, but from here, it was plain to see that a huge chunk of the tree was dying.
